Editing the Harlem Renaissance ed. by Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal (review)

It seems impossible to talk about the period of unprecedented growth in Black American creative output, taking place a century ago and now commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance, without first mentioning how much it is talked about. The Harlem Renaissance, now also frequently called the New Negro Renaissance or New Negro Movement, was referred to by participants as both a "movement" and a "renaissance," and frequently as the "Negro renaissance," and many critics since have seen all of these words as misnomers in one way or another (Mitchell 2010, 641). Considered broadly as a phenomenon of Black creativity concurrent with transatlantic cultural modernism, the period is without question the most discussed in Black literary, artistic, or cultural history. It has been the subject of histories and commentaries, analysis wide and narrow in scope, studies and "new studies", revisitations and recoveries. As Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert note in The History of the Harlem Renaissance (2021), the unending dispute over the period's name is emblematic of its tendency to be "continually […] re-born, re-made, and revisited" (14). Indeed, analysis of the Harlem Renaissance began during the period itself and retrospection certainly features among the hallmarks of its conclusion — the first signs of the period's wane are commentaries on its shortcomings. Richard Wright pulled no punches in "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), which describes the recent past as "the fruits of that foul soil which was the result of a liaison between inferiority-complexed Negro 'geniuses' and burnt-out white Bohemians with money" (97). He instead argued for a revolutionized "perspective" for writers representing Black life, especially the Black working class. Or see Langston Hughes's account of the failure of the literary movement to substantially alter the social status of African Americans in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940).

2022 marks not only 100 (or so) years since the Harlem Renaissance, but also 50 years since the first book-length studies of it appeared — Nathan Irvin Huggins's Harlem Renaissance (1972) and Arna Bontemps's Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Study of the Harlem Renaissance has grown alongside Black Studies more generally: "[M]any of the significant developments or 'turns' in the field (relating to debates about the politics of representation, vernacular theories of black literature, black radicalism, transnationalism, feminism, and performance studies) have been developed through close analysis of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression" (Farebrother 2021, 3). With the emergence in recent decades of diasporic and transnational understandings of the period, revisionary readings through the lenses of queer studies and women's studies, the publication of numerous previously unpublished texts (or texts unpublished in book form), one thing that the Harlem Renaissance has needed is a distillation of this vast field of scholarship, a one-stop collection that would be accessible to students and novice researchers visiting the period in a survey course or even just a unit. Farebrother and Thaggert's volume, with its comprehensive array of extraordinarily researched new scholarship by the authors of some of the best recent monographs in the field, serves just that need. Packed with essays covering many of the newer themes in the historiography of the period, from a transnational focus to leftism, integrating analysis of music and visual culture into the historically literary focus on the period, the volume seems an ideal addition to any Harlem Renaissance syllabus. But one aspect of a newer Harlem Renaissance historiography is scarcely represented, and that's a focus on the material history of textual production in this period. Aside from Caroline Goeser's "The Visual Image in New Negro Renaissance Print Culture", the Farebrother and Thaggert volume acknowledges the material publishing conditions of these writers only occasionally, and not to place those conditions at the center of its concerns.

The publication of magazines, anthologies, and books by a small cadre of publishers was central to the...